Full Moon(ides)/Full Talks Week

Week 5: (2/24/2010) and (2/26/2010)

What a wonderful week with talks and a full moon to cap on Saturday of this week. In India, it is spring time and a colorful festival Holi is celebrated on Fullmoon day.

On Wedensday (2/24), we had a talk by FSF guru Mr. Richard Stallman on Copyright Vs Community. The talk started late at 8:45 pm (instead of at 8:00 pm) due to a travel delay (We had a big snow storm that day and many schools were closed on that day - of course RPI is open no matter what). Despite the fact, it started late, we had a good turnout of students and visitors.



This topic of copyright is of interest to most of the students interested in developing free and open source software. After enumerating the existing problems, Mr. Stallman provided his solutions to copyright problems and provided convincing arguments (at least he convinced me then). Copyright laws are originally intended to enable creativity to enrich the society. In the process, the laws changed to help big corporations and not artists and programmers. Mr. Stallman's solutions are intended to rectify this and who does not want this? There were many interesting questions (such How to collect and allocate money to artists depending on their talents and popularity) and discussions. We had a nice audio support from RPI media services (That person stayed through the talk and even asked a RPITV crew, last years talk of RMS was one of the most watched ones at RPI). Tim Horton (RCOS participant) took pictures. As the topic indicates, the whole effort is community based. We owe a big thanks to Luis Ibanez (of Kitware) for organizing the talk, Rob Escriva (RCOS mentor) for co-ordinating the student volunteers and help in numerous ways, Peter Healy and Bryan Yudkin (RCOS participants) for transportation help and finally to Jason Sanchez (RPICS graduate student) and Andrew Zonenberg (RPISEC) for some crucial conversational help. Thanks are also to the following people who work behind the scenes: Prof. Badri Roysam, Ms. Laraine Michaelides, Dean Prabhat Hajela and Ms. Kimberly Ellenwood. We profusely thank Mr. Sean O'Sullivan who make these talks happen by his generous donation.

2/26/2010 Friday Talks:
We have six students group talks on Friday
1) Sean Austin, Diana Mazzola, Grifin Milsap, Richmund Fries on DroidViz
2) Tim Horton on Contacts Lists for Gnome
3) Corey McClymonds and Patrick Stetter on Music Database Tools
4) John McMaster on universal decompiler
5) Joe Chrzanowski on Was PHP framework
6) Josh Elser on RPInventory

All the talks are wonderful. These projects are all better described here.

Droidviz provides the first open source visualization toolkit and API for Androids - they plan to make a plasma pong for Android to test their API.

Tim Horton (Seed Fame) is beginning to make a final push for his contact lists.

Corey and Patrick (First time RCOS participants) are doing a great job - They even had a live demo during first presentation. Their talk is on lines at dashboard. They are going to provide a toolkit to manage your music cds.

John McMaster (our resident embedded system expert) gave a fabulous summary of his decompiler project. Many RCOS participants will welcome such a decompiler for their own projects and work.

Joe gave a detailed presentation of his WAX PHP framework. Joe has already done a lot of work. It is a matter of days before Joe releases his first version of code. Joe's first RCOS project offcampus rental has been utilized a great deal this semester (with the change in adminidtartion's policy of residence requirements). His project was also mentioned in op-ed page in poly (2/17/2010). (His project page acknowledges RCOS!)

Josh Elser (RCOS's gentle mentor) gave a historical perspective of RPInventory - He gave a nice summary of the challenges faced by an open source project and how to overcome them. His software started in Fall of 2008 and is still going strong with a number of clubs adapting his software. Josh is improvinag his system so that many more clubs and universities and colleges adapt his system. Josh also talked about the new undergrdauate labortatories (including space for RCOS) intiative in CS department
Here are his slides.

RPInventory 2-25-2010

View more presentations from je2451.

Josh's blog post is here.

Looking forward to great talks in weeks to come.

Big Red (Really RCOS) Freak-out Week

Week 4: (2/19/2010)

This week is a big red freak-out at RPI - We have a big hockey game during the weekend and the school spirit is high. On the other hand school and software spirit is always high at RCOS. RCOS is all about students and open source software - It is for them, by them and for them. My job as a co-director is just to enable them to reach greater heights and not to be a hindrance to them.

This week we had five great talks:

1. Devin Ross
2. Joseph Dougherty and their group
3. Nate Stedman
4. Rob Carr and Amy W
5. Matt Arsenault

Devin Ross talked about Iphone Applications and his tapku library. His work has already been noticed with downloads, followers. Now adding another feather to his cap, his library software details may appear in the forthcoming book - stay tuned.

Joe and his group are working on Votebox. They have the hardware donated tothem from various companies. They are planning to redesign their software in C++ with a Java front end. We hope that their system will be ready for Freshmen elections this Fall (and may be 2010 presidential elections too!)

Nate and Rob's group (wizards of gnome and seed fame) are designing two different versions of presentations software for Gnome Desktop (Openoffice presentation sucks - according to Nate!). Nate already had a sleek demo and it is very impressive. Rob's group is designing the system bottom up and many of the subsytems are in place. Nate's implementation language is Vala.

Matt is building clutter bindings for Haskell and he has released his version clutterhs0.1 - This semester he wants to improve adding more fancy applications and release clutterhs0.2 Before the semester is over Matt hopes to release clutterhs1.0 Matt is writing in Haskell and it is good to have some pure functional people in the group.

Students are developing software, using the state of art technology tools and pushing the technology further. After listening to these talks and other students' perceptive questions and comments, my understanding of computer science keeps improving. Thanks!

The mentors are doing a wondeful work. Eric's dashboard, Rob deploying planet blog aggregator (and donating his machines, rack and being sysadmin and more) and Josh's genle prodding help the center a long way. Ms. Duffy wrote a
nice blog about her visit and talk at RCOS.

It is an open invitation to other people to get involved in RCOS - be a mentor, developer, donor(!) to RCOS. We welcome you with your creative input and suggestions. It is up to you to step up the plate and play ball! (Spring is almost here and my baseball metaphors are all over!)

First Three Weeks at RCOS

Spring Semester 2010

Time flies and when you get sick work load drags you down. How do you fly when your body gets dragged down by sickness - That is what happened to me at the beginning of the Spring Semester 2010. Any way I decided to fly with the students who are soaring high! Thanks to Sean O'Sullivan class of 1985 for his generous donation for enabling the students and faculty members to soar high in Open Source Software World.

Week 1: (1/29/2010)

We have a very good group of students interested in doing varied Open Source Projects. Hope their interests sustain through out the semester. We want to hear great accomplishments by the students. Students are still settling down with their projects and finding group partners. Android applications development seem to be a big favorite among students this semester.

For the first week we had two invited guests - Dean Hill from NY State Senate about NY State DotCIO intiatives to make Government proceedings transparent with open source software. His talk slides can be found in

Ny Senate Open Source Initiatives

View more presentations from NY Senate.

The second talk is by Jon Chen on his software development graduate applications review system for the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer.

Gradapp Talk by Jon Chen on 1/29/2010

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Week 2: (2/5/2010)

We had a fine talk by Ms. Duffy class of 2003 on How to Get involved in an Open Source Operating System. Ms. Duffy works at Red Hat and she works on HCI related problem. Her talk slides may be found here. We had a packed audience listening intently. If you do not believe me, please look at the photos her colleague took during her talk here. Ms. Duffy wants to see a number of RPI students apply for internship position at Fedora/RedHat. The internship description may be found here.

Week 3: (2/12/2010)

We have a group of seniors who volunteered to mentor the studens on the need basis. These fine group of students (Rob, Josh, Eric, Devin, Ben, Tim to name a few ) not only produce good code/software, maintain some of the infrastructure (both hardware and software) also help out mentoring. Thanks guys. This week we have talks by the following four students (and their respective groups)

1. Rob Escriva
2. Eric Allen
3. Allen Lavoie
4. Zach and his group.

Zach's group consists of sophomore students and they are implementing a grade tracking (grade tracking is a popular hobby for students at RPI - The folklore is that the students have developed optimization algorithms in computing how much effort is needed to get the grade he/she wants!) for Andorid. We are hoping such a software will benefit the students, tip the faculty members to be more vigilant about slackers (Benefit to the faculty members come only because the software is open source!)



There has been a variety of good news -

1) Yongqian Li , (as a first semester Freshmen) a Fall 2008 project participant of RCOS, created a Firefox extension called FastestFox
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9825). It
is quite popular, with several million users. It has also been covered
in the media, with reviews on CNet, Lifehacker, and other, smaller,
blogs. It is also profitable, mostly from ads, to Li (who is in the Bay area
on leave from RPI)

Press coverage:

• cnet
• Life Hacker

Congratulation to Li (whose 2008 Fall project was about mining wikipedia

2) Computer Science Department is trying to provide laboratory space for RCOS students. Every one is working hard to make this a reality soon.

Links:

1. RCOS website
2. Blog Aggregator
3. Dashboard (Hot off the Press: we have 76% coverage of Spring Projects)